The problem I have is that's the same "yes, we've been repeatedly lying to you and telling you that no, that's what we're doing, but trust us, this is for your own good" line that we've been hearing for years.

And either they're doing a tremendously effective job at back-patching evidence, or the terrorists that the NSA is claiming all were really captured by actual legwork from actual feet on the ground evidence, and the terrorists that the FBI is claiming are all actually developmentally disabled adults who were convinced by FBI agents posing as terrorist leaders to consent to participating in such activities.

Meanwhile, we're seeing that the DEA is actively abusing the surveillance data.

Further, we're supposed to accept this level of competence from a set of organizations that didn't have leak plans in place.

Aaaand, we discover that in the great "be afraid, be very afraid" "cyber-war" bogeyman scare, that we are, in fact, the primary aggressor. Against foreign civilian targets.

Mr. Liepman and his cronies simply have no credibility left with me. And I'd even be willing to accept that there's sufficient oversight from our legislators, if I'd seen any evidence that our legislators had actually gotten the information they needed to make such decisions, but we're seeing that the information they have gotten has been manipulated so that that isn't the case.

Further, the "don't worry, we know what's best for you" is exactly what drove J. Edgar Hoover and his ilk.

Mr. Liepman lost me with his premise, "if security is the goal." I don't think
security should be the goal. The goal should be a free country. That requires a
certain level of security but security isn't the goal, freedom is.

But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.

It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.